


(to viggo on his forty-sixth birthday)

by traveller



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-10-20
Updated: 2004-10-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:15:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traveller/pseuds/traveller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>he's never been afraid of time, but for the first time in his life he looks at his path and sees more miles behind than ahead. </cite></p>
            </blockquote>





	(to viggo on his forty-sixth birthday)

_I never thought you were difficult. I never thought you had more secrets behind your eyes than what your lips revealed, but some found you impossible to read, at best in another language, at worst completely closed to them. I always thought you were a simple book, but maybe it's because I learned your language from you, maybe it's because you left those lines on my skin for me to study like a child._

 _Remember how we'd read in your bed? Mysteries with the covers torn off and dog-eared books of poems, their pages a riot of ink underlining and penciled notes... you read me stories of places I'd never been, and insisted I'd see them all some day. You read me philosophy, and told me they were all wrong. I closed my eyes and you read me your own words, and traced them on the back of my neck._

 _Sometimes I can't help thinking that I wasn't ever meant to know you like I did, that I wasn't meant to understand your words, but sometimes I think, well, it oughtn't have been so easy, had it? If it wasn't meant to be, then why could I open you like that?_

::

his bed sits under a window that looks west, that looks toward the descending sun and the bright, flashing sea. it looks away from home and toward the past, toward things he isn't sure he remembers correctly.

his sheets don't match the pillows, the pillows don't match the quilt and it all clashes with the walls, painted half dark green and two-thirds light blue, which wouldn't make sense except for the two colors merge in a smear not unlike a pair of shoulders midway up the fifth wall. the windowsill is his night table, where he puts his reading glasses and a bottle of beer, and some evenings he'll stretch out there with a beat-up paperback, reveling in the silence. it reminds him of being a kid, hiding out in his room under the eaves with a stack of comic books or a dirty magazine, only a dusty sunbeam to see by. he used to refuse to turn on the light until he was squinting, eyes watering, the page ever closer to the end of his nose.

sunset comes faster as summer wanes; somewhere the leaves are falling. he watches the horizon, and takes the bulb out of the lamp.

::

 _Sometimes your focus was almost too intense, it was like those movies, you know, where they put the guy in the dark room under the one swinging bare bulb and prise all his secrets from him, secrets he didn't even know he had. They say that everyone talks on the third day, and I did, remember? On the third day, spread out under the hot flashes from your third eye, naked in every way. Sweating under your scrutiny, and I broke, I started to talk._

 _You said later that I never stopped talking, that when you'd asked me what I was thinking then you hadn't meant for me to give you a running commentary for the next year and a half. You said I might look into work as a sports announcer, and started calling me 'Marv,' a joke I still don't get but I laugh at because it's yours._

 _I remember that light like it was yesterday, I know that's a cliché and you hate clichés but it's true. Sometimes I'll stretch out, naked on my bed, and feel it all along my back, the burning heat of your camera, your gaze, and that single bare bulb high above._

::

he works outside in the mornings, cursory caretaking that he could pay someone for but he'd rather get his own hands dirty, he'd rather make this pathetic little plot his own. he misses the wide expanses of his childhood, the endless acres of razor-sharp pampas, the sluggish brown river and sere yellow plain. mending fences was his favourite, he was the oldest and he was allowed to ride out alone to hunt down rusted wires and fallen posts. he would take sandwiches and a thermos of tea, find a piece of shade in the afternoon to eat and doze in the dust.

this land is too new, his property is too green, he can't see anything from his backyard, and nowadays he aches when he naps on the ground. his son has started a birthday joke countdown on his voicemail: "you might be getting old if... your back goes out more than you do!" he laughs because he's supposed to be the good sport, the fun one, but it stings with faint salty truth.

he's never been afraid of time, but for the first time in his life he looks at his path and sees more miles behind than ahead.

::

 _I hated whiskey until I tasted it on your skin. Jameson's Distillery Reserve, somebody sent it to you from Ireland, remember, for your birthday, and Bean said in whiskey years you were either priceless or had evaporated, and you told him he could take his single malt and blow you._

 _When we got back to your place, remember... God, I remember. How the whiskey burned my lips, and my throat going down, and you pressed the bottle to my mouth a second time and said I just needed to get used to it. It was an acquired taste, you said, I'd grow into it and find one day I didn't want anything else. I didn't believe you then but it happened, somewhere between licking the fiery sweet taste out of your mouth that night and yesterday, when I ordered a bottle from the hotel bar because I'd woken up at half-three wanting it._

 _Wanting your hands, remembering getting so drunk we could barely fuck, jerking each other off in between biting kisses, and you said someday I'd understand, you said that someday I would know. At the moment, you know, then... I thought you were talking about the drink._

 _I'm sorry._

::

it's not that he hates his reflection, mind, it's just that he's a bit tired of it. forty-five, no, forty-six years of this chin, this nose, this forehead. forty years of that scar, almost thirty years of that one, that one that splits his beard at a lightning sharp angle and reminds him daily that he's frequently been a fool.

old mistakes seem fresh in the pale orange light of autumn, makes the wounds look bright pink and barely healed all over again. he leaves the bathroom cabinet open so that he doesn't have to look at himself, shaves on auto-pilot while staring impassively at crooked glass shelves crammed with band-aids, cough drops and q-tips, and a bottle of aqua velva with a slow, oozing leak.

it's not guilt he's feeling, it's not regret. it's not a lie, it's not delusion. it just is, it is words that nobody's ever managed to take back, it's blood and tears and come and sweat, it's just _life_ , man, it's just never really healed, and it never really will.

he cuts his chin when his hand shakes; he smears red with the side of his wrist and doesn't bother to check the damage.

::

 _Sometimes I think you thought it was about hero worship or something like, like, because I respected you and also wanted you too, that it made it into something sordid, maybe, I don't know._

 _I didn't worship you._

 _Maybe I should've._

 _Hindsight, that's what this is all about, isn't it?_

 _I remember stupid things about you, random details like what the back of your neck smelt like after you'd been sleeping (stale cigarettes and that hideous blue aftershave you loved so much), or the colour of the blanket you kept folded at the foot of your bed but never used (it was orange and red and yellow plaid, and it scratched when I sat on it bare-arsed). I remember kissing the corners of your eyes, creased from the sun. I remember that you used to throw punches in your sleep. I remember the time you burnt your tongue on my terrible coffee and could barely say your lines. I remember how you never once ground the gears in my Jeep. I remember how your lips moved sometimes when you were reading. I remember counting your scars, and you counting mine, and I remember the story for every one._

 _Every one._

::

he dreams of oiling an endless pile of tack and wakes up with an itch to ride; his saddle's already on the back seat so he drives out to the farm before it's even light. he exhausts both himself and his horse, and feels guilty enough, after, to spend an hour babying t.j. even though he's dead on his feet.

back home he sits zazen in the shower, contemplating the water that runs into his eyes and over his lips, that beads on the porcelain tiles and makes the soap scum blend in with the blue glazing. he contemplates washing his hair, and eventually gives his head a perfunctory scrubbing; the suds run down his jaw and sting the cut on his chin, opened again in the steam.

the voicemail icon is blinking on his phone display, and he can't bring himself to happily be ragged on by his kid anymore; he stashes the phone in the breadbox and tries to find something in the refrigerator that isn't beer or molding. dos equis for lunch and one ex on his mind.

he tries not lying to himself; it works only for as long as it takes to start hurting again.

::

 _You laid me bare, mate, you held me down and you held me open and I don’t know anymore how I could've walked away from that except for that's what you asked me to do, do you remember, and I always did what you wanted, every time. When you would ask me what I wanted, I answered with what I thought you wanted. When you asked me what I liked, I told you what I thought you would like._

 _When you asked me to leave, I went._

 _And it's stupid because it's not like I can blame just you, I was the one who never spoke up, I was the one who never stood on my own two feet until you made me, so I have to thank you, a little, even though for about a day I hated you so much I tasted blood. Every day since, I've walked back toward you. Christ, that sounds so shite, so... yeah. But it's true, and you know I might've stretched the truth sometimes but I never lied to you._

 _And I just called to say I'm here, if you want, you know, if you... want to not be alone. Today. Anyway. Happy Birthday._

::

on this day of all days his grief seems to be a living thing, it stalks him in his sleep and mocks him from the pages of his books. he remembers that first horrible birthday in new york, sick with missing his father, and adding insult to injury there was this wet whiteness, falling from a bleached bone colored sky.

snow. he'd seen photos, seen it on television, read about it in his grammar school primer, but the freezing weight of it was shocking, especially in october, which wasn't winter at all. he hid in his bedroom, refused to come down, his eyes fixed on a horizon with no sun.

 _don't you want your present?_ his mother had asked him. no. i want to be alone.

cards lie scattered and unopened, packages sit stacked by the door. his phone winks at him when he goes to make toast, and he stares at it for a long time before giving in, dialing the code (1234, dad, even you can't forget that), listening. he covers his eyes with his hand, hears the past speak in a voice he knows better than his own.

don't you want your present? yes. more than anything.


End file.
